Film Reviews by griggs

Stephen King clearly has a thing about writers and hotels, and 1408 proves he still gets plenty of mileage out of both. John Cusack plays a jaded author who checks into a supposedly haunted hotel room, only to find it’s far more than a marketing gimmick. The scares come less from jump cuts and more from watching him slowly lose his grip — and his bravado.

Director Mikael Håfström keeps it simple and claustrophobic, letting the weirdness build until you’re not sure what’s real anymore. Cusack’s dry humour and mounting panic do most of the heavy lifting, making the madness strangely believable.

It’s hardly the most original haunted-hotel story, but it doesn’t try to be cleverer than it is. 1408 just gets on with being creepy, and it does it well — a decent ghost ride that’s short on clichés and long on atmosphere.

Hitchcock’s early tale of kidnapping and conspiracy may be modest in scale, but it brims with tension and atmosphere. The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) opens in the snowy calm of St. Moritz before hurtling back to London’s fog and backstreets, where the Wapping scenes give it a raw, lived-in energy that lingers.

You can see Hitchcock honing his craft — the visual wit, bursts of menace, and sly humour threaded through the suspense. It’s lean, tightly paced, and full of moments that would become hallmarks of his later style. The climactic siege in the Tabernacle of the Sun, loosely based on the Sidney Street shoot-out, still feels sharp and unnervingly modern in its staging.

Peter Lorre, fresh from M, steals the film with a performance both charming and reptilian — the kind of villain who smiles just before he bites. Rough around the edges, yes, but unmistakably the work of a director already plotting his way to greatness.

The Shout begins, improbably, with a cricket match at a rural asylum — leather on willow masking something far stranger beneath. The cast drew me in, but I stayed for Jerzy Skolimowski’s rhythm — part folk horror, part fever dream, entirely his own. The match acts as a framing device, and for once it works — cricket and madness feel made for each other. Unease creeps in quietly, between polite conversation and the whisper of the countryside.

John Hurt and Susannah York play a couple whose quiet life in a Devon village is upended by Alan Bates’s Crossley, a stranger with a hypnotic stare and an even darker story. He claims to have lived among Indigenous Australians — described through the film’s very ‘70s lens of exotic mysticism — learning to kill with his voice. Whether true or delusional, it’s hard to say. Bates’s calm, almost courtly delivery makes the horror believable. York, meanwhile, brings her usual cool intensity, continuing the psychological disintegration she began in Images. Skolimowski toys with sound from the start, layering music, noise, and silence until the whole thing hums with menace. Fleeting appearances from Jim Broadbent and Tim Curry add depth and humour.

The Shout is part home invasion, part hallucination. It’s eerie, sensual, and just absurd enough to work. Proudly strange — a distinctly British slice of insanity — polite on the surface, deranged underneath.

Some films simmer; this one just broods. At Close Range takes the true story of a small-town crime family and turns it into a slow, moody clash between fathers, sons, and bad choices. It’s part crime drama, part family tragedy — with tractors, beer, and bad ideas standing in for destiny.

Sean Penn is excellent as the kid trying to break free from his father’s shadow, while Christopher Walken oozes menace as the charming psychopath pulling the strings. His usual rhythm and delivery stick out here more than usual — and not in a good way. It’s all a bit much, and that moustache really isn’t helping. Still, when the two share the screen, the tension’s thick enough to cut with a penknife.

The pacing’s slow, but it fits. James Foley shoots rust, mud, and cloudy skies like they’re part of the story. It’s gritty, tragic, and quietly haunting — a small-town nightmare that stays with you.

Four small-town friends idle by a disused quarry, wondering what comes after adolescence and uncertainty. Dennis Christopher finds his answer in an unlikely place — Italian-style bicycle racing, adopting the accent, the swagger, and the delusion, to the bafflement of his dad, played with gruff charm by Paul Dooley, a former quarry worker.

Loosely inspired by real events and written by Steve Tesich, Breaking Away is less about bikes and more about growing pains. It captures that post-graduation drift, when dreams wobble and the real world starts pedalling faster than you can keep up. The humour is gentle, the emotion honest, and the dialogue natural enough to feel real.

Still, the film’s easy charm occasionally flattens into Sunday-afternoon sentiment. It coasts more than it sprints, and while the ride is pleasant, it rarely feels urgent. A nice tailwind of sincerity — just not quite the rush it promises.

My Own Private Idaho drifts along like a half-remembered dream — strange, sad, and quietly beautiful. Gus Van Sant takes a story about street hustlers and turns it into something poetic: all empty highways, cheap motels, and that aching need to belong somewhere.

River Phoenix is unforgettable as Mike, the narcoleptic drifter who keeps nodding off mid-heartbreak, in the role that turned him from heartthrob to legend. Keanu Reeves plays Scott, the rich kid slumming it for thrills until real life, and real emotion, catch up. Their connection feels messy and real — part friendship, part longing, all heartbreak.

The film meanders, but in the best way — part road movie, part fever dream. Slow, hypnotic, and full of feeling, it captures what it’s like to be young, lost, and still hoping the next turn might finally lead home.

Few horror films make loneliness feel this creepy. Pulse takes the cursed technology idea made famous by Ring and gives it a millennial twist — trading videotapes for haunted websites and webcams. Released at the dawn of the broadband age, Pulse turns early internet anxiety into a ghost story about modern isolation. It’s the kind of film that makes you want to unplug your router and open a window, just to let the ghosts out.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa builds tension through silence and stillness rather than jump scares. Grainy screens, flickering lights, and figures caught half in shadow do most of the heavy lifting. It’s eerie, slow-burning stuff — the kind that seeps under your skin rather than leaps at you.

The final stretch gets a bit airy and philosophical, but it still works. Pulse isn’t about scares so much as sadness — a ghost story about isolation in a world that’s supposedly more connected than ever.

What starts as a pleasant wartime curiosity soon turns rather wicked. Beneath the bunting and vicarage manners, Went the Day Well? hides a sharp edge — daring to imagine the English countryside under Nazi infiltration and calmly showing how the locals might respond. The result is part village fête, part firing squad.

It’s propaganda, yes, but unusually sly about it. The idyllic setting, gossiping villagers, and church bells — all the stuff of postcard England — become weapons of their own. By the time the guns come out, the shock feels almost indecent, as if Miss Marple had wandered into a war film.

Beneath the bunting and vicarage manners, Went the Day Well? hides a sharp edge — daring to imagine the English countryside under Nazi infiltration and showing how the locals fight back. It’s part village fête, part firing squad: sly propaganda with a polite smile and a nasty streak. A cosy war film that still draws blood.

Woody Allen revisits familiar ground — neurotic love, creative frustration, and Manhattan looking its best — but a younger cast gives it a faint hint of freshness. Jason Biggs does a convincing Allen impression without it becoming parody, while Christina Ricci brings real spark to a role that could’ve been pure chaos in lesser hands.

The dialogue is, as ever, sharp and self-loathing in equal measure. Everyone sounds clever, miserable, and slightly in love — which is probably the point. There’s warmth in the cynicism, and a surprising tenderness beneath all the wisecracks.

It’s not Allen’s best, nor his worst. Anything Else ambles along agreeably enough, like a chat with an old friend who repeats himself but still makes you laugh. You’ve heard it before, but you don’t entirely mind hearing it again.

Few films balance charm and social critique quite like Miracle in Milan. Based on Cesare Zavattini’s novel Totò il Buono, it reimagines neorealism as a fairytale of poverty and grace. Vittorio De Sica, best known for Bicycle Thieves, trades that film’s grit for whimsy, spinning a fable about a young man, a shantytown, and a magic dove — gifted from heaven by his late mother — that just might help the poor soar above their station. It’s surreal, sweet, and far funnier than Italian neorealism usually dares.

Miracle in Milan is often described as De Sica’s most optimistic film — a deliberate counterbalance to his earlier despairing works. The surreal delivers the social commentary; the magical supplies the hope. Even the villains are oddly endearing, fitting perfectly with the film’s playful tone.

Technically, it’s flawless — every shot, composition, and scrap of set design feels intentional, turning hardship into something improbably beautiful. Winner of the Grand Prize at Cannes in 1951, it may overplay the fantasy by the end, but it’s still a delight: a film that believes kindness can lift you — quite literally — above it all.

There’s a fine film hiding inside Something Wicked This Way Comes — you just have to peer through the smoke and carnival lights to find it. Ray Bradbury’s small-town nightmare of temptation and lost innocence should be a perfect fit for Disney’s early-1980s flirtation with darker material, but the tone wobbles between spooky fairytale and Sunday-school sermon. Disney’s nervous re-editing makes it uneven, but the atmosphere still casts a spell.

Still, the mood is rich. Jonathan Pryce makes a marvellously sinister Mr Dark, all snake-oil charm and velvet menace, and the autumnal setting drips with nostalgia and dread in equal measure. When they work, the carousel sequences feel like childhood dreams curdling into nightmares.

It doesn’t quite earn its goosebumps, but there’s a strange warmth to the chill. Imperfect though it is, it still captures something rare: that moment when growing up starts to feel like a kind of loss.

For a film about schools colliding, this one spends remarkably little time in the classroom. The Happiest Days of Your Life sets up a great premise — an all-boys and an all-girls school accidentally forced to share a building — but never quite makes the most of it. Adapted from a stage play, it feels more like staff-room satire than schoolyard chaos, with the teachers getting the laughs while the pupils fade into the background.

Still, as a comic showcase for Alastair Sim and Margaret Rutherford, it’s hard to beat. Their duelling egos and impeccable timing turn even the smallest squabble into farce. The script is surprisingly cheeky for 1950, poking fun at propriety while never quite breaking it.

By the end, the energy dips and the farce turns muddled rather than madcap. Yet it remains a charming slice of postwar British chaos — all manners, mishaps, and just a hint of mischief.

For a film about ticket inspectors, Kontroll has remarkably little to do with fare dodging or enforcement. That might have made a decent documentary; this is something stranger — a battle between good and evil set in the bowels of the earth, the Budapest Metro standing in for it. The title itself comes from Hungarian slang for these inspectors — “kontrolls” — who roam the tunnels like fallen angels with clipboards. The whole thing plays out underground, where fluorescent lights flicker, tunnels echo, and reality feels one missed stop away from breaking down.

Nimród Antal keeps it moving at a steady pace, blending thriller, dark comedy, and myth without ever settling on one. Shot entirely after hours in the Budapest Metro, its greys and grime give everything a ghostly pallor, which only makes the terrible early-2000s fashion pop all the more — lending the film a weird, timeless edge.

Kontroll isn’t always coherent, but it’s moody, original, and oddly haunting — proof there’s more to the underground than just lost tickets and fluorescent strip lighting.

Revenge rarely looks this slick or feels this bleak. I Saw the Devil turns the cat-and-mouse thriller into something far more vicious — a looping nightmare where hunter and hunted trade places until there’s nothing left but pain. It’s part procedural, part horror show, all about how far a man can go before becoming the monster he’s chasing.

Kim Jee-woon directs with cold precision, staging the violence like choreography — brutal, elegant, and exhausting. Lee Byung-hun and Choi Min-sik are magnetic opposites: one icy with control, the other revelling in chaos, both circling each other with grim fascination. The film’s graphic violence made it controversial in South Korea, yet that extremity serves a purpose — to strip away the glamour from vengeance and leave only its consequences.

It’s not an easy watch, nor should it be. Beneath the carnage beats a moral question that refuses to die: when revenge becomes routine, who’s left to call themselves human? I Saw the Devil sits comfortably within the Korean New Wave of revenge cinema — alongside Oldboy and Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance — and, like them, it stares back — unblinking.

It's always nice when a history film remembers that politics can actually be fun to watch, and Lincoln mostly pulls that off. Spielberg gives it his usual shine—great sets, warm light, and a script that trusts you to keep up. It's your classic awards-season biopic, but done with real care.

Daniel-Day Lewis is as meticulous as ever, though his Lincoln feels more gentle than gripping. The real spark comes from Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens, tearing through Congress like a man allergic to nonesense. The rest of the cast is stacked and doesn''t waste a scene.

It moves a little slowly and stands a little too straight, but it's beautifully made and surprisingly sharp. Not everything hits, but when it doesn, it's proof that politics and Spielberg can still pull you in without the fireworks.